Too late to hide, too late to be silent, and too late to play by the rules
Well, I'll start as usual: I haven't eaten or slept for three days, and I'm just scrolling through the news feed.
I cry with horror, helplessness, and compassion, hide my phone, then take it out again, read it again, and cry again.
I feel an eerie déjà vu: in February and March 2014 I also read incessantly: Ukraine, Russia, Putin, war. Only I read aloud to an audience of millions.
I worked as the anchor of the daytime newscasts of Vesti and aired news about the events on the Maidan and then about the military actions in eastern Ukraine.
I remember this moment well: my boss Revenko called me before the newscast and started yelling, "What protesters! Are you crazy? Rewrite your text! Write it: spiritual successors of Stepan Bandera".
It was then that I realized that my departure was a matter of time, and a fairly short one at that. But it was easy to say and hard to do. No, I didn't have a mortgage. But neither did I have an alternate source of income. I was cowardly, I was patient, and I was losing my mind even more.
When I asked him to refute the information from the western media that there were Russian soldiers in the war zone, the military correspondent told me not to ask him such a question on the air ("I don't want to lie").
In general, almost all the data that appeared on the air was a creation of the Russian Ministry of Defense. Just like now, when after three days of fighting in the Russian army there was only one casualty.
But perhaps my most disgusting feeling was in June 2014, when I aired the version that a Ukrainian fighter jet had flown up to the Malaysian Boeing and had fired so many shells at it. There seemed to be a graphic attached to it.
In a way, my pregnancy saved me. I just ran away on maternity leave, although my boss persuaded me to work some more. Even then I was almost 100 percent sure that I would not go back, although friends and acquaintances turned their fingers up: don't be silly, if you don't go on air, someone else will. But this argument did not work at all: okay, let someone else do it, just not me.
For the first six months or a year I got many calls from work asking me to get back on the air, but every time I refused, I could not find the strength. Then the calls stopped, and our paths with All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company parted.
I didn't feel like a hero, I didn't want any big words, I just couldn't work on that infernal conveyor belt anymore.
These were hard times for me, because the salary of a national channel host allows you to make certain compromises with your conscience and not deny yourself anything.
There are plenty of people who are happy with that arrangement on Channel One and Channel Two.
I heard my former colleague say something like this: "I agree that what we are saying is too much, but I have my own opinion about it".
Let me rephrase: the person doesn't agree with what they are saying, but they are saying it anyway because they don't want to lose such a cool job. In this regard, I was always amused to hear that I "sold out to the Americans" (I worked for three years at the "Current Time TV" channel), because my income level in the Vestivian days was clearly higher than it had been in Prague.
But I have never once regretted my choice. My only regret is my profession: it no longer exists in Russia, it has been destroyed. As a professional presenter and reporter, I am forced to change my field of work because I cannot find a place for myself in today's Russian media.
But I wouldn't want to be in the shoes of those involved in creating news content on the state channels today - when Russian troops are ramming tanks and missiles into Ukrainian cities, and the commander-in-chief is playing with the nuclear button.
I don't see the point in contacting my former colleagues, as Tatyana Aleksandrova did, or in asking questions, as Elena Martynova did.
But I hope that my former colleagues understand that this war will level everybody. Rich and poor, status and not-so-wealthy, in that everyone's future is crossed out. It's also crossed out for your children, gentlemen of the Russian news media. And you did it yourselves, with your own hands – the hands that write, edit, film, edit and broadcast something soaked in lies and hate. Lies and hate.
Too late to hide, too late to be silent, and too late to play by the rules.
